Meet the Mozilla OS Developer Phone

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It’s no secret that Mozilla has been working on a mobile OS. Previously codenamed Boot2Gecko, the project focused on a purely HTML5 based system that worked in many ways like current mobile devices. As the project grew into Mozilla OS, the company has laid out a partnership with ZTE that will have real world devices in certain markets early next year. Testing for this OS had previously consisted of a compiled ROM that would be flashed over a handful of Android devices. Now, Mozilla has moved into full fledged product evaluation mode with their own custom developer phone.

As expected of any developer device, there’s no branding to be found. No one at Mozilla was willing to confirm that ZTE was the manufacturer of the developer device, though the phone bears a vague resemblance to a couple of previous generation ZTE Android phones. The 480 x 800 display isn’t winning any beauty contest, but certainly gets the job done. The phone uses microUSB for power, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a 5MP camera. The phone is powered by a 1.5GHz processor, but no mention of how many cores or the manufacturer.

Mozilla wasn’t willing to discuss many of the specs for this particular device, making sure we were aware that the phone was strictly for internal use. This is the hardware that all current nightly builds of Mozilla OS are made for first, and the device where all of the testing and tweaking is done.

A development specific piece of hardware wasn’t the only sign of maturity in the Mozilla OS project. The whole OS has received some much needed polish from the last time we saw it. Apps are presented in small bubbles instead of large rectangles, allowing for more to fit on a screen. Long pressing on any of the icons causes them to pulse in unison, signaling the ability to move them around on the screen or remove them entirely. This build had a full functional camera and photo gallery, all still done in HTML5. Swiping through the OS feels much smoother now, and the phone responded quickly to the soft buttons on the bottom of the device. It’s still pretty far from perfect, in fact I was told to “see if I could crash it” as soon as I was handed the phone.

Mozilla OS has grown up a lot in a very short time, and with a newly found hardware partner it is only a matter of time before we see a new player in the smartphone ecosystem. Eventually, Mozilla hopes to be able to distribute their developer devices to active community members and long time supporters of the project. If Mozilla does decide to distribute these devices, it is expected that this will happen early next year.